When I first arrived in Penang, I noticed that the hotel’s spa offered a range of treatments. One of these was a facial which involved ‘whitening’. I didn’t think much of it - I don’t tend to, where this silly ‘beautifying’ malarkey is concerned - although I’m sure I vaguely wondered whether that meant the facial also included whitening your teeth. “How interesting,” I thought. And how wrong I was.

Not that the idea of a facial which also offers teeth-whitening isn’t interesting. Indeed, it’s so “interesting” as to be “completely silly”. Because, obviously, I got it completely wrong - as multiple trips to the pharmacy next door over the past few months have proved.

While the beauty products - or more precisely, the skincare products - on offer in a Malaysian pharmacy look exactly like the ones for sale back in the West, more than a cursory glance shows that there’s one, rather stark, difference. It’s the presence of products like this:

and this:

Yes, my fellow Western ladies: we may think we have it tough, being subjected to the pressure to be thin. But women in the East not only face that (slimming and dieting products are everywhere here, too - despite, or perhaps because of, the general smaller build of Asians); they are also told that they should be more white.

As this article in the New Straits Times pussyfoots around says, the culture here rather uncomfortably tells people - and most specifically, women - that it is desirable to have skin as white as possible; and there are all manner of beauty products (and spa treatments) on hand to make that happen. Lancome, Chanel, Estee Lauder, Clinique, Dior, Olay… they’re all at it.

Clearly there’s a link here between being white and being of a higher class, as well as the implication that it is better to look as least ‘Asian’ as possible. Being of a darker skin is associated with being of a race that is more undesirable; or of a lower class (all that working outdoors in manual jobs).

Conversely, of course, we in the West see having darker skin - but not too dark, mind! - as something desirable, as at its roots it has the association with being either a) healthy (all that time spent outdoors) or b) rich (all that leisure time spent outdoors).

It’s all very strange, and rather worrying. Where will it end? Well, apart from ‘with Michael Jackson’, that is?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 3.00am and is filed under Malaysia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.